Ola Alejandro, Hi Ricardo,

Fantastic idea, Alejandro! Recently I posted a message at the fox.wikis at http://fox.wikis.com/wc.dll?Wiki~WhyVFPIsTheToolOfYourChoice. The text reads (sorry it's a bit long):

"I started my programming career with ancient languages like ForTran and IBM assembly then, among others that I've been working with, I can say that the best ones were PL/I, Algol and TurboPascal. These languages have in common many things: explendid implementation of control structures; full range of host computer data types; incredible features when dealing with blocks, functions and procedures; elegant syntax (that's why I don't like C, but...) etc. So I got used to all these features."

"They are really great languages, but all of them lacked the most important feature that a language has to have today, IMO: a full native DataDefinitionLanguage? and DataManipulationLanguage. And that VFP has, and it is superp! I don't mean all those "exogenous" ODBC, ADO, SPT etc, I mean USE, SELECT, SQL commands, SCAN, UNLOCK, SEEK, native tables and cursors, views and all that well known stuff. Of course the exogenous" ones have they role to play and I'm not excluding them!"

"VFP still has a long way in front of it in the implementation of many well desired features to achieve those "common tasks" that the average programmer (myself included) are willing for. One of those could be to access Oracle, SQL Server, Informix etc using VFP's native DML syntax (why not?) thru the use of (maybe 3rd party supplied) add-on "driver DLLs" that could do the "durty job" between the program itself and the access routines of the DB - much like those "exogenous" stuff already do (even the DBC/DBF/... access could be a component DLL, just to make it generalized)."

"So, VFP has great features and it is a great tool, but above all, the best of all, for me, is VFP's native way to access data. That's why VFP is the tool of my choice. What other tool can beat it?"

I'll keep my eyes on this discussion too.

Fernando